PERFORMING THE YELLOW RIVER CANTATA BY XIANGTANG HONG DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in Music in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Chester L. Alwes, Chair and Director of Research Professor Poshek Fu Assistant Professor Katherine Syer Assistant Professor Philipp Blume ii ABSTRACT Since its composition in 1939, Xian Xinghai’s (1905-1945) Yellow River Cantata has nearly exclusively remained the province of Chinese choral groups. In large measure, the failure of the work to make significant inroads into the world of Western choral music stems from the daunting challenges posed by the Mandarin text, as well as the ethnic musical elements and folk instruments present in even the most “Western” adaptations of the piece. Given that only one commercially available edition exists in Chinese, the focus of this dissertation has been the removal of all potential obstacles to Western performance. To that end, the author has produced a phonetic, Romanized version of the original Mandarin text by Guang Weiran (1913-2002), as well as a carefully-crafted, singable English translation that, nonetheless, remains as faithful to Xian’s original musical conception as possible. A significant aspect of this work has been the incorporation of the considerable, unwritten body of performance traditions that have derived from the series of revisions that the work has undergone and the sizable body of recorded performances. It is the author’s hope that, having undertaken these tasks, this iconic Chinese choral work may become just as accessible and popular with Western choirs and audiences. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS …………………………………………….. iv PREFACE ....................................................................................................... v CHAPTER 1: THE YELLOW RIVER AS A SYMBOL ............................... 1 CHAPTER 2: GENESIS OF THE TEXT AND MUSIC ................................ 3 CHAPTER 3: THE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST …………………… 25 3.1 The Composer ............................................................................... 25 3.2 The Composition ........................................................................... 41 3.3 Variants ......................................................................................... 50 CHAPTER 4: PRODUCING AN ENGLISH PERFORMING EDITION ….. 57 4.1 Textual and Musical Considerations ............................................. 57 4.2 Evolution and Transformation – The Unique Case of Movement Three …………………………...................................................... 59 4.3 Performance Practice and Orchestration Options .......................... 65 CHAPTER 5: CHORAL SCORE ………………………………………….... 66 1. Song of the Yellow River Boatmen ….......................................... 67 2. Ode to the Yellow River ............................................................... 102 3. Yellow River’s Water from Heaven Descends …………………. 120 4. Yellow Water Ballad ..................................................................... 142 5. Musical Dialogue on the River Bank ………................................ 159 6. Yellow River Lament ………………………………………….... 175 7. Defend the Yellow River ……………………………………...... 191 8. Roar, Yellow River! …………………………………………….. 230 APPENDIX A: TRANSLATION ...…………………………………………. 272 APPENDIX B: TRANSLITERATION ……………………………………... 319 APPENDIX C: HOW THE YELLOW RIVER CANTATA WAS BORN …. 368 APPENDIX D: XIAN’S WRITINGS ………………………………….......... 373 APPENDIX E: PERFORMANCE HISTORY ……………………………..... 380 APPENDIX F: DISCOGRAPHY …………………………………………..... 388 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 391 iv TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.1 Map of the Yellow River ............................................................ 2 Andrea Hsu, “Tourism Along the Yellow River Glorifies China’s Past,” NPR web article, 13 December 2007. Photograph by Alice Kreit. Figure 1.2 Mother River Statue in Lanzhou, China ..................................... 2 Public Domain. Figure 2.1 Hukou Waterfall ……………..................................................... 5 Andrea Hsu, “Tourism Along the Yellow River Glorifies China’s Past,” NPR web article, 13 December 2007. Photograph by Andrea Hsu. Figure 2.2 View of the Yellow River .......................................................... 10 Public Domain. Figure 2.3 Hukou Waterfall ……………..................................................... 14 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Figure 2.4 Yellow River: Dykes and Canals ............................................... 16 Wei Huang, Conquering the Yellow River (Peiking: Foreign Language Press, 1978). Figure 2.5 Human Suffering in the Sino-Japanese War .............................. 19 Public Domain. Figure 2.6 Mass Grave at the Huangpo Massacre Site, Hubei Province ..... 20 Photo courtesy of Alliance for Preserving the Truth of Sino-Japanese War. Figure 2.7 Chinese Territory Occupied by the Japanese (1940) ………...... 23 Map courtesy of the Department of History, United States Military Academy Figure 3.1 War Posters ……………............................................................. 49 Courtesy of the Hennepin County Library, James K. Hosmer Special Collections Library, Kittleson World War II Collection. MPW00292 (left), MPW 00450 (center), MPW00500 (right). v PREFACE The Yellow River Cantata by Xian Xinghai 1 (1905-1945) was the first multi- movement Chinese choral composition to gain widespread performance outside of mainland China. Despite its enduring popularity among Chinese people across the world more than seventy years after Xian set Guang Weiran’s (1913-2002) poem to music, the cantata has remained a work performed almost exclusively by Chinese singers and conductors. A staple of Chinese choral literature, the Yellow River Cantata has not attracted any significant amount of Western performance or recognition. This inability to resonate with Western choirs may be the result of the difficulties it poses linguistically and instrumentally; Western choirs do not typically sing in Mandarin, or have access to the ethnic folk instruments required by even the most “Western” version of the piece. To complicate matters further, the composition has undergone a series of revisions (during Xian’s life and after his death) that have only made the work’s accessibility to Western performers more problematic. No fewer than six different versions of the Yellow River Cantata exist: 1. 1939, Yan’an, Xian Xinghai 2. 1941, Moscow, Xian Xinghai 3. 1946, USA, Wallingford Riegger 4. 1955, Shanghai, Li Huanzhi 5. 1975, Beijing, Yan Liangkun 6. 2005, Hongkong, Carmen Koon Despite this wealth of scores, only the last is commercially available; none provide Western choirs with either an IPA-based guide to pronouncing the original Mandarin text 1 Chinese names are written with the family name before the given name. The British Wade-Giles system transliterates Xian’s name as, “Hsien Hsing-hai.” vi or an accurate, singable English text that would make non-Chinese performance a viable option. The author has sought to remove these impediments in this new edition, based on the 1975 version, the most widely performed and recorded of the Yellow River Cantata . To facilitate performances in English or Mandarin in the West, this new edition provides both a Romanized, phonetic pronunciation of the Chinese text and a new English singing translation, specifically crafted to preserve as much of the original rhythm and meaning of Xian’s musical setting of the text as possible. The complex political and cultural forces that shaped both Xian’s original score and the subsequent derivative versions have been thoroughly discussed elsewhere; consequently, the focus of this dissertation has been upon those practical elements that seem to have impeded Western performances. The historical background given was consciously limited to biographical facts, essential to the contemporary Western performer. For this reason, the author decided to produce a two-piano reduction of the 1975 orchestration first. Ultimately, a complete orchestral score (including appropriate Western substitutions for Xian’s designated Chinese instruments) will appear. The author consulted a wide range of recorded performances 2 to extract those subtleties of performance that are not notated in any score. These may or may not have been precisely notated by Xian in the original score, but have, in the author’s opinion, been established as the standard interpretation by subsequent performances. Options for replacing the indigenous Chinese instruments included in Xian’s original score with Western 2 See Discography, pp. 388-390. vii surrogates, as well as the technical limitations that such a transfer may pose, form another practical layer of this edition. In an effort to maintain a clear level of separation between the interpretive markings in Xian’s autograph, the subsequent adaptations of it, and the editorial clarifications made by the author to reflect the work’s long performance history, the various levels of changes have been indicated using clearly-differentiated brackets. In general, the following principles have guided the construction of this edition: 1. Wherever possible, Xian’s original rhythms were retained. 2. None of the pitches in the original choral parts were altered or omitted. 3. Markings related